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Cole didn't move. The voice coming from inside the temple was his. Same flat register he used when he was too tired to lie. Same way he clipped the end of "late" like he was biting it off.
Ivy had her knife out. Not pointed at the door. Pointed at him.
"Back up," she said.
He didn't. The door was open maybe two inches. Enough to see black inside. No torchlight. No glow from a working spell. Just black that didn't move when the wind did.
"Cole."
"I heard it."
"That's you. Your voice."
"I know."
"You know?" Her hand was shaking. Not much. Enough. "That's not supposed to happen. Dead things borrow voices all the time but they don't get it right. They don't sound like—" She stopped. Swallowed. "Back up. Now."
He took a step forward instead. His boots hit the stone threshold and something in the air changed. Colder. Thicker. Like walking into a smokehouse the morning after the fire's out.
The symbols on the door were clearer up close. He'd seen them before. Not this exact sequence but the style. The way the lines doubled back on themselves. The little gaps where the carver's hand had hesitated.
Kael's hand.
His mentor had died three years ago in a border outpost north of here. They'd found the spell scorched into the floor. Found his coat. Found his ring. Didn't find him. Just a burned outline where he'd been standing and a smear of ash that didn't match wood or cloth or skin.
Cole had been the one to scrape that ash into a box. The guild gave him a week. He took four days and spent the rest drunk enough he couldn't remember Kael's face.
He remembered now.
"It's his work," Cole said.
Ivy was beside him. Close enough he could hear her breath coming too fast. "Whose?"
"My mentor. Kael. He carved this."
"Your dead mentor."
"Yeah."
"The one who disappeared."
"Yeah."
She grabbed his shoulder and turned him around. Her eyes were gray in the moonlight. Bright. Scared. "Listen to me. That thing inside isn't your mentor. It's not you. It's wearing both and it wants you to open this."
"It's already open."
"Then it wants you to go in."
Cole looked at her hand on his shoulder. At the knife still in her other hand. At the footprints she'd shown him earlier, his own death burned into the ground three weeks ago. He hadn't believed it then. Wasn't sure he believed it now.
But he believed the seal on the door.
He pulled free and turned back. The symbols ran in a ring around the doorframe. Standard warding array. Cheap stuff. The kind of thing an apprentice could carve in an afternoon. But the center was different. Three marks stacked on top of each other, carved deep enough the stone had cracked. He didn't recognize the language. But he recognized the spacing.
Kael used to leave notes like this. Little puzzles. He'd carve a glyph into the doorframe of whatever contract house they were staying in and wait for Cole to figure it out. Took Cole two months to realize the glyphs weren't code. They were directions. Left turn. Two miles. Meet me there.
This one wasn't a direction.
It was a lock. And it was asking for a key.
"It needs blood," Cole said.
Ivy went still. "No."
"Look at the center mark. The one that's cracked. That's a toll sign. Old type. You pay to pass."
"I said no."
"I'm not asking."
"Cole." She stepped between him and the door. "I saw you die here. I saw your footprints. You walk in and you don't walk out."
"Maybe that's why I need to go in."
"What?"
He didn't have an answer for that. Didn't have words for the feeling in his chest that had started the second he saw the seal. Like a hook pulling. Like a hand on the back of his neck. Like Kael's voice in his head saying pay attention, this part matters.
He drew his knife.
Ivy's hand shot out and caught his wrist. Her grip was iron. "Don't."
"It's my blood. My choice."
"It's your death."
"Then it's mine."
He twisted free and dragged the blade across his palm. Sharp sting. Hot line of pain. Blood welled up fast, pooling in the cup of his hand. He turned it over and let it drip.
The drops hit the center mark.
For a second nothing happened. Then the stone under the blood started to smoke. Not burning. Just dissolving. Like the blood was acid. The cracks around the mark spread, thin black lines racing out toward the other symbols, connecting them. The whole array lit up. Not with light. With absence. Like someone had cut holes in the world and the dark underneath was leaking through.
The door swung open. Not slow. Not creaking. Just open, all at once, and the black inside wasn't black anymore. It was a hallway. Stone walls. No torches. But he could see anyway, like the air itself was gray.
And at the end of the hall, a figure.
Tall. Thin. Wearing a coat Cole had seen burned.
"Kael," Cole said. His voice cracked on the second syllable. He hadn't meant to say it out loud. Hadn't meant to say it at all. But it came out anyway, like something he'd been holding in his mouth for three years and finally had permission to spit.
The figure didn't move. Didn't answer.
But a voice came. Not from the figure. From deeper in. From the dark behind it.
"Come in alone, Cole."
It was Kael's voice. The real one. The one Cole heard in his sleep sometimes, telling him to check his wards, to watch his left, to stop being stupid and listen.
Ivy's hand closed on his arm. "No."
He pulled free.
"Cole, no—"
He stepped over the threshold.
The door slammed shut behind him.